2011 Ford Mustang GT - Greed For Speed

Kenny Rice’s desire to go fast has his ‘11 GT flyin’

When I first read over Kenny Rice's tech sheet, I thought he worked for either a performance shop or mail-order house. On the tech sheet under occupation, Kenny put, "Aftermarket Services Manager."

It was a natural assumption, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Kenny, who lives in Odessa, Texas, works for Hy-Bon Engineering, a company specializing in vapor recovery system design and building.

Yeah, when Kenny began describing what he does on a daily basis, he lost me pretty quick. I had to stop him. He was confusing me more and more with each word. In a nutshell, a vapor-recovery system captures gas vapors from oil fields, landfills, and even breweries, rather than letting them escape into the atmosphere. These vapor-recovery systems help reduce a company's carbon footprint, or impact on the environment. Yeah, I now have a headache, too.

Once the conversation turned to Kenny's '11 GT, seen here, he started speaking English, and I didn't feel like such an idiot.

Kenny told me he started out with a '90 LX coupe, then an '03 GT, and then his currect '11 GT. Kenny says his '90 coupe and '03 GT remained largely stock. The '03 GT was a bolt-on car, but he had a Brand X hot rod so the Mustangs had to stay reliable to get him from place to place. That's the opposite of what we usually do. Most of the time it's our Mustangs we modify to the point of being unreliable, but for Kenny, he kept his past Mustangs stock to keep them reliable modes of transportation.

All the while he had the Brand X car, Kenny made the natural progression from Fox to New Edge to Coyote. Some of us have yet to make the jump to an '11-'13 GT, but like the rest of us, the latest 5.0 engine intrigued Kenny. He bought the GT in March of 2011.

"I loved the Grabber Blue in 2010 and glad I waited on the 5.0," Kenny says. Immediately after purchasing the car Kenny began researching power adders, and decided on the Whipple 2.3 supercharger "mainly due to looks," he tells us. "It simply looked like it belonged on there."

Kenny installed the Whipple himself, and took it to the dyno, where his work resulted in 540 horsepower at the wheels on just 7 pounds of boost. In that form Kenny enjoyed the car over that summer, but he decided he wanted more.

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"Ya just get greedy," Kenny says. To that end, Kenny called up JPC Racing for a complete exhaust system, a triple-pump fuel system, a 2.75-inch blower pulley, and several BMR Suspension bits. Back to the dyno for a retune, and this time the GT put down 687 horsepower and 602 lb-ft of torque. When the Coyote hit those kinds of numbers, Kenny knew its guts were on borrowed time. He filled a factory block with forged internals, and his dad Randy helped swap over several mechanical components. Randy has been a Ford service technician for over 32 years, and for the same dealership, so we know his help came in handy.

During the engine swap, Kenny also came to the realization that the blower was pretty much maxed out, and as you gather, Kenny didn't build a short-block to make the same power as before, he wanted more. He knew an upgrade was needed. The answer came in the form of a ProCharger F-1A supercharger kit. "I found the kit at a good price so I bought it, and sold the Whipple," Kenny says.

With the car back on the road, he could immediately tell a difference between the two power adders. "The Whipple made great power, but the ProCharger pulls and pulls and pulls," Kenny says. With Ken Bjonnes of Lund Racing handling the tune, the car put down 748 horsepower and 618 lb-ft of torque to the Mickey Thompson E/T Street radials.

True to form, when I interviewed Kenny for his feature, he mentioned he had a 4R70W being built for the car, along with adding a BMR Suspension tubular K-member and front control arms, and a Wolfe Racecraft rollcage.